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FreeBSD 12.1

178 points| SpaceInvader | 6 years ago |freebsd.org | reply

55 comments

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[+] cperciva|6 years ago|reply
This release is dedicated to the memory of Kurt Lidl, a long time BSD developer, who died on October 10th from metastatic kidney cancer: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/in-memory-of-kurt-lid...
[+] rootbear|6 years ago|reply
I was sad to see that in the release notes, I had not heard. I remember Kurt from the Old Days, when I went to some open houses at UUNET and attended Usenix conferences.
[+] thijsvandien|6 years ago|reply
FreeBSD is amazing, and a major reason for that is how well it is managed. I would find it very hard to name three other open-source projects of comparable size that are so well-organized and have consistently delivered for this long. Here's a warm shoutout to the FreeBSD Foundation, as well as your reminder to donate: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
[+] sebiw|6 years ago|reply
Been running Linux servers for years. FreeBSD is what gave me back the passion to run servers.

It's such a well structured operating system. The documentation is just great and Jails are a really nice way to get lightly isolated environments to run different web services.

Thanks to all the people who make FreeBSD possible!

[+] cpach|6 years ago|reply
I hear you. TBH, most popular Linux distros feels very bloated nowadays. The other day I created a VM and there I installed FreeBSD for the first time. The process was really quick. It felt like a breath of fresh air. Much much simpler than what I had imagined. Everything felt very logical. I have thought about this before but since I already knew Linux I was hesitant to take the time to learn another Unix-like OS. But now I feel that I want to carve out some more free time to get more acquainted with FreeBSD. I’m quite sure it will pay off in the end.
[+] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
> The trim(8) utility has been added, which deletes content for blocks on flash-based storage devices that use wear-leveling algorithms. [r344688]

Is this replacing an older utility or is FreeBSD way behind on supporting SSDs?

[+] takeda|6 years ago|reply
FreeBSD is issuing TRIM in ZFS and UFS2 for quite a while.

When I was researching the topic, I learned that how TRIM is implemented on the drives, issuing it in bulk is more efficient than individually, so perhaps that's why the tool was added? Although looking at ZFS at least it looked like it also collects blocks that supposed to be TRIMmed and issues it periodically.

[+] drewg123|6 years ago|reply
This is to erase an entire device. Filesystem support for trim has been present for many years.
[+] trasz|6 years ago|reply
Support for TRIM in ZFS, UFS (kernel), or fsck (userspace) has been in place for years, but there was no easy way to tell “TRIM all this whole device now”.
[+] LeoPanthera|6 years ago|reply
Trim support has been built in to ZFS since FreeBSD 10.

Presumably, this utility is useful for disks that are not ZFS formatted.

[+] naniwaduni|6 years ago|reply
> BearSSL has been imported to the base system. [r343281]

Exciting. Is it being used for anything yet?

[+] cperciva|6 years ago|reply
I believe it was imported so that it could be used by code-verification bits in the boot loader and exec calls. I'm pretty sure those aren't turned on by default yet, but my understanding is that Juniper uses them.
[+] jackyb|6 years ago|reply
Is there a 300-page or less book that can teach practical usage of FreeBSD? Like the C book or the UNIX programming environment book. I have it installed on one of my laptops but never got around to use it.
[+] MuffinFlavored|6 years ago|reply
My train of thought went "hmm, I wonder if FreeBSD would be good to use in production for running some Docker containers" and I stumbled across this https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker

> Docker's currently broken.

that leads to this: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D21570

[+] jsiepkes|6 years ago|reply
Docker became popular over FreeBSD jails the same way MySQL became popular over PostgreSQL in the 2005-ish. Not based on technical merit but because of ease of use. In case of MySQL it was a Windows installer which made for a low barrier of entry. However MySQL didn't do ACID transactions, views, etc. at that time, all things PostgreSQL had.

Similarly Docker was easy to use with images but security was a mess. The first couple of years Docker stance was actually that their container wasn't to be considered a security boundary and being able to access the host system "wasn't a bug". This in total contrast to FreeBSD jails which were always regarded as a hard boundary.

Docker in FreeBSD is not as simple as you might think. FreeBSD has a Linux ABI compatibility layer in order to be able to run Linux binaties (just like WINE is a Windows ABI compatibility layer). Docker itself, the CLI application, the API, etc. is probably the easiest part.

[+] kazen44|6 years ago|reply
to be fair, freebsd had something like docker for decades. Jails have existed for a long time and are easy to use.
[+] gerbilly|6 years ago|reply
Docker is mainly a Linux LXC thing. Why would you want to run that on FreeBSD?